AMC V8 Shenanigans

[TyTheJeepGuy]

Was driving around with my brother in the truck when the battery voltage went down to 12.5 steady, we pulled off the highway and checked it out. All grounds and wires looked good, belt was turning the alternator fine. Got it home and pulled the alt the next day and the cap on the unused internal regulator connections was absolutely fried. Something had fried. Decided I'm done paying for these alternators so I bought a GM 3 wire. That took a while to figure out, and boy is it hard to find a diode in a store these days. I miss radio shack.

Either my brother or I stripped the bolt from the alt bracket in the new aluminum heads, so I had to drill it out and helicoil it. While the truck was out of action I decided to install a remote transmission fluid cooler with its own fan harness so we had a full saturday of truck thrashing. The reason for this change was the old aux trans cooler was taking up something like 50% of the front of the radiator, as well as running fluid through the integrated oil cooler in the rad, and with the converter slip I couldn't help but imagine that was dumping heat onto my already barely big enough radiator, especially on slow hill climbs. It does however add a point of failure and I don't have a monitor for transmission temps so I'll probably be adding that soon. The relay for its fan is triggered by accessory power. I used nylon-braided 6an lines for that.

On Wednesday I leave for FSJ Invasion in Ouray! Stress tested the truck yesterday going up to Yankee Hill and it did well in terms of coolant temps on the climbs, and got me there and back without issue. Hopefully the Ouray trip goes without a hitch.

[Jim]

TyTheJeepGuy previously posted:

[TyTheJeepGuy]

So the truck did Ouray FSJ invasion in July, did some solid offroading and interstate miles on that trip. Even held 75mph in heat of the afternoon and no cooling issues. That's with a torque converter that doesn't want to lock up until 3100rpm so that's what I held for hours on end... wasn't happy with that but amazed that it stayed cool.

There'd been a consistent leak since putting the new t case adapter back on and I had a few things I wanted to do before going on the long overlanding trip Andrew had planned for breaking... in his new trailer. So I dropped the Quadratrac alone in the garage, I only had a mark on my belly from it for weeks its fine. Slapped RTV on either side of a new paper gasket and pushed them back together. Solved the leak! Unfortunately while stunting on some weak Toyotas on a hill climb, I ate a big ol piece of humble pie. The Quadratrac transfer case just isn't the beast its said to be online. I stretched out that fancy BJs offroad 340 dollar chain and now the t case slips gear teeth under heavy load.

When I emailed them to try and find out next steps instead of throwing another 340 dollar chain every month or babying my big bad truck they claimed that no one, had EVER, stretched one of their chains. I call BS but clearly it just wasn't going to work for my application.

The venerable TH400 was popping leaks left and right that I couldn't seem to solve and I had to manual shift it to take off in first gear, and the high stall converter was fun for loud faster take-offs but obviously had way too many drawbacks. You have almost no options for what to adapt to the back of it without changing the output shaft and I'm done with the Quadratrac. So, it looked like the next steps were the "maybe one day" NV4500 and NP205. I've collected those and been in the process of the swap. I'll get another write-up on here with more images for my next post.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/6YWfeJKgjdPXW51h7

You can actually here it clickety clack in that video, enjoy

[TyTheJeepGuy]

I want to get the right part numbers and everything in the manual-swap build post, and I haven't even completed the job, but in the meantime here's some photos of the "new" transmission and transfer case. The transfer case came attached with an SM456 and Andrew came out to help me collect them, fittingly the J10 was the mule for going to get its new guts. The NP205 and SM456 were picked up from Masonville by Horsetooth reservoir which was a cool nostalgia thing for me since that's where my Dad used to live when I'd visit him in grade school.

[Jim]

TyTheJeepGuy previously posted:

[Mountaineer01]

You're an expert at this point of removing transfer cases and transmissions.. You want to fix my rear main seal?